Now that the first bit's up, I think I can legitimately bother you with extraneous stuff.
While I'm here, if you have issues with the paragraphing, there might be a little button thing at the top with a sort of backwards filled in P. Click that, and it'll show the indenting. Anyway, back to the serious stuff.

Firstly, I'm doing some character sheets for the main characters. The minor ones I'll just tell you about, if you are interested.
The pics on the sheets will hopefully make sense of some of the descriptions, because Ælfwulf in particular doesn't exactly dress conventionally... Plus, you get to see Eromenos' sexy human form. What could be better?

The character mug (up tomorrow after I've taken some pics) will also give you some pictorial references for them, as well as a bit of a peek into a future story. I'd like to apologise now for the sheer hideousness on the drawings of Eadsige and Æþelweard.

And that's my second real point. Spelling. Would you guys like me to use fully authentic spellings of the Old English, with the weird letters, or would you prefer me to spell them more modernly? _"modernly"? I think you'll find you're stuck with the combined ae in Ælfwulf's name, and also his brother's. Maybe you'd prefer a guide to the names and pronunciation of the additional letters. Tell me, or you'll get what I prefer.

I had a third point, and I've forgotten it. I shall ramble instead. You'll never see the difference.
I'm doing a meme for FF (not Final Fantasy, "Feeling Familiar") _{hence the acronym FF(NFFFF)} which involves me drawing stuff and scanning it, because doing stick figures feels like cheating. It'll be arriving whenever I get it all finished and fitted together.

Ah yes, the third point! Geography. I have a kind of idea what the world they live in looks like, but drawing it would require putting in all the surrounding kingdoms etc and I'm not Tolkien. What d'you mean you can tell?
Anyway. If you are looking for a rough guide then, to use an analogy familiar to most of you, the two countries mentioned in the story are in roughly the same position as the Shire in a map of Middle Earth. North and west, but not in the nassty icy bits or anywhere near the coast. Most other places are south and east. I would have picked modern Europe, but it's not the right shape. In size, they're about the same as Luxembourg. More detailed perusal of a map would enable me to say whether that's each of them or both combined, but ATM a map isn't available so I have to go by memory.

Randomness:
The tonsilitis has been pretty much zapped by antibiotics. What an anticlimax.
The weather has been insanely hot. Is that just us, or the UK too? I'm off to visit the BBC to find out, and also to look up all the stuff on that AirFrance plane. We didn't get much of the story.